The Future of 'Stonehenge'?

In the Houston Chronicle’s quick safari through everything that’s gone up and is going down in the Arts District, arts writer Molly Glentzer says the area doesn’t yet have a smidgen of the lively street scene it’s gonna need.

CTA TBD

Stonehenge, the lot in front of the Meyerson, courtesy of Google Maps

Easily the most interesting tidbit in the Houston Chronicle‘s quick safari through everything that’s gone up and is going down in the Arts District comes in the last paragraph. In today’s report, arts writer Molly Glentzer gets around to the future, how the Arts District doesn’t yet have a smidgen of the lively street scene it’s gonna need. So she mentions the gaping eyesore that has blighted Ross and Pearl for two decades:

The real estate crash of the 1980s may have even played into the district’s favor. One of the still-open blocks, which Dallasites jokingly refer to as Stonehenge, contains the monolithic base of a project abandoned in the 1980s crash. It might have become twin 50-story towers. Now its owner, Hall Financial Group, has until 2012 to acquire permits for what will likely be a 22-story mixed-use center. It’s “the main missing piece,” [district executive director Veletta Forsythe] Lill says. “Its development is extremely important.”

For that, we’ll forgive Glentzer’s writing about the Woodall Rodgers Park in such a way that it sounds as if it’s part of the Annette Strauss Artist Square (“Annette Strauss Artist Square, with its open-air theater, opens this summer next to the Winspear. Its 5.2-acre “deck park” will traverse the Woodall Rogers [sic] Freeway”) — and for tossing out this bit of chum for the Houston readers:

“You could do it all within about a six-block walk in the city also known as the big-hair capital of Texas.”

Jerome Weeks is the Senior Arts Reporter/Producer for KERA. Previously at The Dallas Morning News, he was the book columnist for 10 years and the drama critic for 10 years before that. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, American Theatre and Men’s Vogue magazines. View more about Jerome Weeks.